What's New in New Zealand Music?

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I posed this question in another thread, but figured I should ask it generally. I'm currently up for a job in New Zealand (at Victoria University). I was well into all things NZ about a decade ago, mainly the Flying Nun stuff of course, but also the noisy side of things. I'm wondering if people could recommend some new things that might be of interest (and might actually give me a headstart in the interview process).

And of course, if the job comes through, I'll buy a pint when I get there.

Are the Arc Cafe people still doing things? I've got a couple of their comps, but have lost track. What's up in Wellington (if anything). Where's it happening there now? I was there about 10 years ago (and managed to see the Puddle on one of George's good nights).

i was big into all the flying nun stuff about 10 yrs ago too, then lost track. i was actually in NZ in march of this year, and i was pleasantly surprised to find Bike and Dimmer. both arose from the ashes of straighjacket fits. dimmer has a vaguely portishead-ish air, but with male vocals, and bike is noisy indie rock, if you want really quickie/insulting summaries.

In terms of a unique NZ sound, a couple of acts from Wellington are making huge waves with the public, and bypassing the music bizz circus – Fat Freddy’s Drop and Trinity Roots. Trinity have two self-released albums, Freddy’s have some 12”s on overseas based labels, but rumour has it a (double?) album in the works. Both acts fuse soul/dub/reggae/funk/electronic but in a very deep, very cool way. New Zealand hiphop has been getting the big push recently too – Scribe, Deceptakonz, P-Money, Che Fu etc.

On major labels, there's the straight up rock of The Datsuns, The D4 and about a hundred thousand million lesser bands...

In Wellington there’s real healthy little avant rock (if that’s what you call it) scene based at a venue called Happy – saw an incredible band there last night called The Elephant Men- manic vaguely free jazz but with trad rock line up and f*cked up vox. In terms of indie guitar music, Marineville (Wellington) are fine band – due to release their second album this year some time. And of course the Phoenix Foundation (Wellington) are great. Lots of other little bands here doing cool stuff – The Chandeliers, The Timeless Sounds, The Labcoats. Plenty of talented musicians with open minds…

There’s always exciting sh*t happening here underground, eh? Most of those great Dunedin bands are still going in some capacity and tour every once and a while. Saw The Renderers here in Wgtn last week and they were incredible (still).

Hmm this probably didn’t help – it’s mostly pretty hard to access if you don’t live here! Try googling ‘bnet awards” – that’ll list the nominees for the national “college radio” (in American parlance) awards – most good new acts will be there…

hey steve, i should get you to help me out with some of the up and coming wellingtonians for my site.. gimme an email about the likes of the labcoats (looove donaldsons' drumming..) and whatnot, i need to profile all the new bands surfacing with self-released eps and the like

all this ugly music, i remember when new zealnd used to have nice music. lil cheif is gonna save me though cause they have the brunettes and the new alec bathgate and the ed cake record and the nudie suits and the tokey tones and somone else, oh yeah old axemen people or something.

terminals are godlike, are they still going? stephen cogle, sigh. where's the new bats album, i know someone stole their computer with the album on it but i think that was a long time ago.

the new ed cake is ok.. not as good as bressa creeting cake, but certainly better than goldenhorse.. the new bats album is due at the end of september (its called 'herbert' and is being mixed at the moment by john kelcher).yes ther terminals are still going strong, though not much in the way of new material.. most the band lives in chch these days. i managed to book a gig with them earlier in the year, alongside the renderers and hamish kilgour doing a solo acoustic set. was a GREAT night..maryrose has a new album due under the name 'maryrose crook and the renderers', and brian has a new solo album recorded too.. though it might be a wee while before he releases it.oh and keith - i love the new brunettes, jonathan's a really striking song-writer these days.. the new alec bathgate is almost ready, and according to tim bathgate its a lot more 'rock' than the first album.. he reckons its really good.

thanks andrew . we are gonna work on getting some form of the long-threatened-touted-blah-blah-drunkenly-bragged-about-never-seen-the-light-of-day double album 'terminal peace' out somehow. someway. maybe w. live at the windmill tracks! mind you, if we can just hold off two more years, it'll be our tenth 'anniversary'.

hey i didn't, i mentioned the futurians.. missed batrider though (fucking excellent lead solos from julia, tobys a great, active bass player..etc) haven't heard rainy and only a bit of cortina (which is pretty great).

hey cameron, i run the http://thebigcity.co.nz nz music site, and you guys keep coming up, but ive got fuck all info on contant pain or your and roddys other stuff..

Wardagger are a kinda Swans-y sludgy band, fuzzed out, kinda Burzumy but even lower-tech. It's on Battlecruiser, a sidelabel of Campbelle Kneale's Celebrate Psi-Phenomenon. One kinda long track that hits the spot.

Happy to surprise you fh. Been a while. Back in Montreal for a bit, then off to Helsinki for a bit. And I've been shortlisted for a job at Victoria Uni in Wellington. Hence my question. Which leads me to ask what people thought of that Chris Knox soundscape-y thing. I haven't heard it. I know that's probably a classic stereotype of the non-NZ New Zealand music fan, but I know it raised some hackles. I haven't been a fan for years now (though I admit to looking forward to Alec Bathgate's new one).

Has anyone mentioned Surf City? They're almost a Flying Nun circa early 90s pastiche but with some great songs. If the Flying Nun roster were like the Premier League table, I'd have the Chills, the Bats, the Clean and Straitjacket Fits occupying the Champions League spots, Surf City would be somewhere towards the bottom of table with Garageland.

The key inspiration for this work is the letter scripted by Henare Taratoa (Ngāi Te Rangi) in March 1864 to the Governor of New Zealand, Sir George Grey. This letter outlined the way in which both Māori and British should conduct themselves during war, namely the battle of Pukehinahina (Gate Pa) in my tribal area of Tauranga Moana. This code of conduct was known as the Rules of Engagement, and is where this album takes its name from.

For the making of Willowbank, Yumi Zouma's members — Charlie Ryder, Josh Burgess, Christie Simpson and Sam Perry — settled on a plan to reunite for the New Zealand summer. To complete what would become their first significant work written and recorded entirely in their home country, they rented a studio in Christchurch’s semi-demolished CBD, on one of the few remaining blocks that still characterizes the city from before it was destroyed by a series of earthquakes. “It was as though there was a brief pause in all of our lives and we finally felt like a band from New Zealand,” said Burgess. “We were on home turf and creating from a place that felt fundamentally natural.”

Hey, sbahnhof, keep forgetting to thank you for boosting the Ria Hall album and Estère EPs - while I'm probably not as up on them as you are, spending more time listening to them has been great. The whole Loop Recordings / Wgtn jazz-school thing had put me off a little (early aughts PTSD), but they're both a lot richer than that. Having an Irish transplant / Erykah Badu fan asking for local recommendations was another good reason to engage, as well. Could have sworn I'd mentioned the tei. mixtape here, but must have been somewhere else.

Quite a strange choice of group name, but this came out of nowhere to pretty great effect:

Imagine five months of that with a 6-track EP - they controlled the NZ-only chart even more with a full album, though their sound is less reggae-ish now. Bands like that might be the Kiwi music with the most long-running appeal in NZ – helped by reggae's prominence in movies like Mt Zion starring Stan Walker, and The Pā Boys. It can't only be people at BBQs listening to it...

Sort've wished the interview had teased out things re, say, their popularity vs Ria Hall's rather than putting all NZ reggae / Aotearoa roots / dub / whatevs stuff in the same basket.(etc)

Well, Rules of Engagement got to number 6, but maybe it's a simple case of being more 'challenging' thematically that it didn't become more popular? Dunno if interludes in Te Reo from the '60s are what the kids are streaming these days. I hope they are, but not at all sure. BTW, don't reggae and roots mean the same something similar? Obv Tomorrow People are playing a very poppy variant of those. Reggae is usually best imo when it's political and extremely pissed-off, like Herbs, or, uh, Sons of Zion? (For bemused ILMers, the music's popularity here goes back to the Māori rights and Pacific anti-nuclear protest movements of the 1980s.)

In pop atm, the solo musician October is on a run of four decent-to-great singles, but might win the Unpopular Populism star prize without some urgent Spotify fixing. New song "1000 Eyes" is her most polished, but maybe least distinctive https://youtu.be/dPtzNAoI1OU ... The previous one "All She Does Is Stare" was more representative of, as one writer cautiously called it, "a zero f***s approach". She don't give a fly*** eff.

Hamish Kilgour of The Clean Has A New Solo Album Coming Out This Summer

Ba Da Bing will be releasing Finklestein, on July 6th

It’s our second record with Hamish, and we’re happy to brag we’re the only label who has ever released a Hamish Kilgour solo record! Take that Cleano Productions!

The Clean member Hamish Kilgour's second-ever solo album, Finklestein, flips the singer/guitarist/drummer's path taken on All of It and Nothing. Having previously gone for intimate, minimalistic performances, Finklestein displays a chock-full production quality akin to a fairytale. It's a fitting change, seeing as the songs are based around a children's story Kilgour conceived for his son about a kingdom that invents a way of dealing with their depleting gold resources. The songs include organ, saxophone, pedal steel, piano, vibraphone, harmonica, even footsteps (Hamish is renowned for his stepping), most of it performed by Kilgour and his producer/collaborator Gary Olsen at Olsen's studio, Marlborough Farms in Brooklyn. Originally conceived as being a children's book as well as album, Finklestein rides roughshod through this fairytale world with grace.

Finklestein took a year to record, as Hamish's involvement with a large part of the Brooklyn music scene, as well as dates with recent New Zealand Music Hall of Fame inductees The Clean, split his time. His songs benefit from this elongated recording period, as each track creates its own space within the Finklestein world, mixing instruments and melodies in a rainbow of ways. Yet it's Kilgour's songwriting sensibilities that hold the album together, his charismatic and loose arrangements within a congenial environment of musical play.

For more information, please write Ben and Katie at press at badabingrecords.com

...Chelsea Jade and 19 indie songs :-) Well, not quite, and there's a lot of really nice music on the list, but it isn't as "diverse" as they claim – it was selected by only nine people, and it shows. In the whole list there's one rap song, lots of downtempo/MOR stuff, no female Māori artists, no songs fully in Māori... (Songs in Māori have the Maioha Award, but that gets much less publicity.) At least they didn't nominate Groany, but it's all very "Music 101 on a Saturday afternoon". I'm not a big SWIDT fan, but "Conquer" leaps out of the speakers against this field.

The voting system has some problems similar to those the Taite Music Prize was criticized for. Artists enter their own songs, and must be APRA members, which shouldn't be necessary imo, if they're truly seeking the best NZ songwriting. This year's awards come after the 2017 Silver Scroll, when APRA voters chose an all-female top 5 for the first time.

As well as that, it's a fusion of musical styles from Sudan and New Zealand. Surprisingly it was put together by rock frontman Jon Toogood, of Shihad – he first heard the Gisma Group and aghani al-banat, "girls' music", when he got married in Khartoum, Sudan. The band recorded there with him, some of which is on this album years later.

Who won the Silver Scroll, you don't wanna barely know, but Ria Hall won the Maioha Award with her song "Te Ahi Kai Po" from Rules of Engagement.

‘Te Ahi Kai Pō’ is about healing after war, and trying to find hope in times of despair. It draws on Ria’s own family history, telling the story of the Battle of Te Ranga (just south of Tauranga), where, in June 1864 the British Army took retaliation for the earlier battle at Gate Pā. Over a hundred Māori died there, some buried where they fell.

The new album by Yoko-Zuna and a host of guests, Voyager, continuing their cool electro-hip-hop-jazz thing. Though with the cover artwork, they're positioning themselves as the Daft Punk of New Zealand :-)

We each possess a different lens, voltage and ancestral life that the world rn needs to hear from - and we know this record serves a purpose bigger than what we could do as individuals. Ngā mihi mega ki a mātou katoa.

I have felt very upset and outraged by the reports coming out of Nauru, especially the stories of children as young as five engaging in serious self harm.

We wrote this song to raise awareness of what is happening in offshore detention, in the hope that more people will sign up to the campaign to pressure the Australian government to end the horror they have created for these little kids and their families.

The solo debut Shine Your Light by Kaaterama, who's in the successful pop group Maimoa. Her first single "He Iti" is getting the iwi radio plays, but most impressive imo are her soulful tracks "Mr. Man" and "Paiheretia", with the choir of Te Reanga Mōrehu o Rātana:

We posted about the Broods single earlier – their album will be called Don’t Feed the Pop Monster. Hopefully it'll turn out to be the best thing ever and/or a Gaga rip-off, just so we get more funny interview quotes like

1-listen review: it's good! I like it nearly as much as the Chelsea Jade album, with which it shares quite a lot in common sonically, nice word. Critics seem to agree it's a 5.0 out of 10.0, and skim-reading their equally mediocre numerology, it's because the band haven't changed their sound. Which reads more like a dig at electro-pop than anything. (There's one track that might be a baggy Madchester tribute... if that helps.) But "Peach" is prob the bangin'est song on there.

OMIT employs home-built instruments constructed from modified electric motors and salvaged sound sources to create a startlingly original soundworld. It is a world he inhabits alone, isolated in the small town of Blenheim in southern New Zealand, but it involves a deep exploration of the human condition. Over the years OMIT’s music has become less noisy and more sparse and minimal, as open signal patterns and oblique textures pass each other in haunted spaces.